Anybody who has even a passing familiarity with IT — and even most who don’t — encounters open source software on a daily basis. Whether it’s Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser, the Apache HTTP Server, which powers most of the world’s Web sites, or Google’s Android mobile platform, open source software has gone from being solely the domain of geeks to part of many people’s everyday life — and it’s become big business.

Open source hardware — hardware built using freely distributed and freely modifiable blueprints — is still more of niche category. It is not an area bereft of its high-profile projects, however; the RepRap 3D printer, for example, and the Open Graphics Project.